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finally thanks to the malicious ‘distortions’ of post-war propaganda,
deliberately exaggerated Germany’s ‘crimes’ while downplaying her losses.
Germans did not so much forget as selectively remember.
in December 1951, just 5 percent of West Germans surveyed admitted feeling ‘guilty’ towards Jews.
In the first post-war census of 1950, one-third of all West German households were headed by a divorced woman or a widow.
‘The people must be given a new ideology. It can only be a European one.’ West Germany was distinctive in that it alone stood to recover its sovereignty by joining international organizations; and the idea of Europe could itself substitute for the void opened up in German public life
The attention of West Germans in the two decades after Hitler’s defeat did not need to be diverted away from politics and towards producing and consuming: it moved wholeheartedly and single-mindedly in that direction.
Internationally condemned after Hitler’s fall for blindly obeying immoral orders, Germans thus turned the defect of their industrious obedience into a national virtue.
For men like the writer Günther Grass, or the social theorist Jürgen Habermas, both born in 1927, West Germany was a democracy without democrats.
In his 1978 film The Marriage of Maria Braun, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (born in 1945) acidly dissects the serial defects of the Federal Republic as they appeared to its youthful critics.
prosperity, compromise, political demobilization and a tacit agreement not to arouse the sleeping dogs of national memory—did not deflect attention from the old defects. They were the old defects, in a new guise.
At the close of the Second World War, the peoples of Western Europe—who were hard put to govern or even feed themselves—continued to rule much of the non-European world. This unseemly paradox, whose implications were not lost on indigenous elites in the European colonies, had perverse consequences.
The world war, however, had wrought greater changes in the colonies than most Europeans yet understood.
blaming the Left for the Dutch failure to reassert colonial authority following the interregnum of Japanese occupation.
the image of ‘France’ itself as a trans-oceanic continuum, a place in which the civic and cultural attributes of Frenchness were open to all;
Of all the European states France, by 1953, was by far the most dependent on US support, in cash and kind alike.
France had been in steady decline at least since 1871, a grim trajectory marked by military defeat, diplomatic humiliation, colonial retreat, economic deterioration and domestic instability.
the US would furnish Britain with Polaris submarine-based nuclear missiles (as part of a multilateral force that effectively subsumed Britain’s nuclear arms under US control).
Before traveling to Nassau, Macmillan had held talks with De Gaulle at Rambouillet; but he had given the French President no indication of what was to come.
intended by its framers to obviate the need for rapid moves to colonial independence, offering instead a framework for autonomous and semi-autonomous territories to remain bound by allegiance and obedience to the British Crown, while relieving them of the objectionable trappings of Imperial domination.
less traumatic
For whom?!
1950 Tripartite Declaration, which committed Britain, France and the US to acting against the aggressor in the event of any Israel-Arab conflict.
By indulging in so patently imperialist a plot against a single Arab state, ostensibly in retribution for the exercise of its territorial sovereignty, London and Paris had drawn the world’s attention away from the Soviet Union’s invasion of an independent state and destruction of its government.
they had given Moscow an unprecedented propaganda gift.
Thanks to the Suez crisis, the divisions and rhetoric of the Cold War were to be imported deep into the Middle East and Africa.
Britain’s very dependence on America illustrated the nation’s fundamental weakness and isolation.
Where else but to Europe could Great Britain now look to recover its international standing?
diluted national identities.
a framework for instituting procedures designed to establish and enforce future regulations.
This trend towards mutually advantageous coordination was thus driven by national self-interest,
The same concern to protect and nourish local interests that had turned Europe’s states inwards before 1939 now brought them closer together.
the emphasis was placed upon encouraging output rather than efficiency.
Europe’s peasants were becoming increasingly efficient farmers. But they continued to benefit from what amounted to permanent public welfare.
In exchange for an undertaking to open their home market to German nonagricultural exports, the French effectively shifted their domestic system of rural guarantees onto the backs of fellow EEC members, thereby relieving Paris of an intolerably expensive (and politically explosive) long-term burden.
Efficient Dutch dairy combines were no better off than small and unproductive German farms, since all were now subject to a common pricing structure.
Each year, the EEC would henceforth buy up all its members’ surplus agricultural output, at figures 5–7 percent below the ‘target’ prices. It would then clear the surplus by subsidizing its re-sale outside the Common Market at below-EU prices.
each country gave its farmers what they wanted, passing the cost along in part to urban consumers but above all to taxpayers.
And farm products were from an early stage excluded from the deliberations of GATT.
No single country could have sustained so absurd a set of policies, but by transferring the burden to the Community at large, and tying it to the broader objectives of the Common Market, each national government stood to gain, at least in the short run.
The EEC was a Franco-German condominium, in which Bonn underwrote the Community’s finances and Paris dictated its policies.
the price to be paid for the recovery of Western Europe would be a certain Euro-centric provincialism.
The economic history of post-war western Europe is best understood as an inversion of the story of the immediately preceding decades.
It was not just that millions of children had been born after the war: an unprecedented number of them had survived.
optimism plus free milk.
The experience of living among so many people from unknown foreign lands was unfamiliar to most Europeans.
but as late as 1976 there were still only 1.85 million ‘non-whites’ in the UK population, 3 percent of the total.
The net effect of these laws was to end non-European immigration into Britain less than twenty years after it had begun.
European teenagers of the late fifties and early sixties did not aspire to change the world. They had grown up in security and a modest affluence. Most of them just wanted to look different, travel more, play pop music and buy stuff.
But it is symptomatic that those polled already regarded these goods and services as rights of which they were deprived, rather than fantasies to which they could never aspire.
Just as European teenagers identified the future with an America they hardly knew, so their parents blamed America for the loss of a Europe that had never really been, a continent secure in its identity, its authority and its values, and impervious to the sirens of modernity and mass society.
